Aluma Learning

Teachers today face an impossible tension: they are asked to support dozens of learners with diverse needs, interests, and speeds of learning, yet they are constrained by limited time and rigid classroom structures. Teachers struggle to give every student individual feedback on their higher-level thinking during each class, and they struggle with the amount of time it takes to give detailed, substantial, and timely feedback to the more than 100 students that many teach.

Students often progress through curriculum on a set pace with their classmates, no matter how fast they learn a concept or how much they would benefit from slowing down to understand a concept better. This conveyor belt pacing is hard to avoid even for teachers most skilled in differentiation. Students who need more support are pushed forward in ways that limit their learning and detract from positive identity development. Students who master material quickly are forced to wait to progress, losing both learning and motivation.

In corporate learning and development, companies need employees who can master complex skills, adapt in real-world scenarios, and retain knowledge over time — but managers and corporate educators have the same struggles as K-12 teachers when working with so many employees at once. As a result, they often rely primarily on compliance-driven modules that lead to little long-term learning. Engagement is low, retention is poor, and organizations spend heavily on external consultants without scalable impact.

Both in schools and workplaces, learners would benefit from individualized interactive instruction, regular practice with complex thinking processes, detailed and specific in-the-moment feedback, and adaptive coaching.

Meanwhile, a wave of sophisticated AI tutors has arrived, but classroom and workplace integration remains extremely difficult to orchestrate. Because AI is rarely integrated into classroom structures, students typically turn to AI sporadically for periodic assessment preparation, and because they do so mostly outside the classroom, they often do so in ways that hurt their growth as their outsource their struggle and their creative thinking. AI-powered education tools often demand major pedagogical shifts, offer limited flexibility, or reduce personalization to algorithmically scored multiple-choice questions. Educators are overwhelmed by complexity on one side and underwhelmed by shallow “solutions” on the other.